Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel, 1892–1973),British author and scholar, best known for his works of fantasy, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Though his first three years were spent in South Africa, Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary grew up in an English country village and, after 1900, in Birmingham, where he attended King Edward's School. There he discovered a love of languages—Old English, Gothic, Welsh, Finnish—and began to invent his own. His widowed mother was disowned by her family after her conversion to Catholicism, and when she died in 1904 she named as her two sons' guardian a friendly priest who lodged them in a boarding house. At 16 Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Bratt, whom he married eight years later. After obtaining a degree in English language and literature from Oxford, he served in World War I as a signals officer. While he was in the trenches of Flanders, he created a mythology and world based...
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